AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 38, no. 2 (Spring 1999)

HIERARCHY IN THE WORLD OF FIJIAN CHILDREN

Karen J. Brison
Union College

This article argues that children in Rakiraki, Fiji, develop assumptions about social relations and styles of interaction in playing with other children which are different from those favored in adult life. Childhood experiences shape attitudes about gender and about hierarchy among adults that are at odds with public ideology in Fijian culture. Fijian culture stresses hierarchy based on relative age in which older and wiser people nurture and guide younger and less capable people. Children internalize these ideas but also develop an ambivalence about hierarchy due to tensions between children of different ages. Fijian culture segregates men and women and ranks most men higher than most women, but children play in mixed gender groups where boys and girls interact as equals. This produces a model of male and female equivalence among at least some adult women. (Fiji, play, socialization, gender, hierarchy)

“ONCE INTREPID WARRIORS”: MODERNITY AND THE PRODUCTION OF MAASAI MASCULINITIES

Dorothy L. Hodgson
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

This article analyzes the historical articulation of modernity with the shifting production of Maasai masculinities in Tanzania. Combining ethnographic and historical sources, I explore the shifting meanings, referents, and experience of two Maasai masculinities which refract the modern/traditional dichotomy imposed and sustained during the colonial and postcolonial periods. Probing the intersection of modernity and masculinity demonstrates that masculinities are relational, historical, produced rather than constructed, and the site of local mediations of modernity. (Tanzania, Maasai, masculinity, gender, modernity)

THE TRANSFORMATION OF VIOLENCE IN THE COLONIAL ENCOUNTER: INTERCULTURAL DISCOURSES AND PRACTICES IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Joachim Görlich
University of Cologne

The Kobon in Papua New Guinea have transformed a central aspect of their social organization, namely the dialectic of violence and co-operation, subsequent to the activities of the Australian colonial administration. This article analyzes the pattern of colonial control by taking into account: 1) how the Kobon and the Australian colonial administration perceived each other, 2) how they interacted, and 3) which transformations emerged from their interactions. (Historical anthropology, colonial encounter, social order, violence, Papua New Guinea)

CONFLICT RESOLUTION THROUGH A TRADITIONAL RITUAL AMONG THE BEDOUIN ARABS OF THE NEGEV

Alean Al-Krenawi
Ben Gurion University of the Negev

John R. Graham
University of Calgary

The Bedouin practice of Bisha, or ordeal by fire, is analyzed as a conflict-resolving ritual of reciprocal relationships between the individual, small group, community, and society. Two case studies demonstrate that the ritual reflects the social order, reinforces conformity to collective values, deters behaviors that deviate from culturally acceptable norms, and transforms social structures by resolving conflicts between two or more people and by reinstating a sense of mutually agreed-upon justice. (Bisha ritual, Bedouin Arabs, conflict resolution, cultural sensitivity, mediation, mental health)

SACRED UNITY, SACRED SIMILARITY: NORWEGIAN CONSTITUTION DAY PARADES

Barbro Blehr
Stockholm University

Norwegian Constitution Day parades are annual occasions for public demonstrations of belonging to the Norwegian community. Simultaneously they are events that mark social statuses and categories by including them in different ways or by excluding them from participation. This article discusses three kinds of contemporary Constitution Day parades, inviting participants in their capacities of schoolchildren, teenage students, or citizens. Examining their composition and focusing particularly on the citizens' parade, the article shows how parades, partly against their overtly stated intentions, come to support a narrowly defined Norwegian normality and ascribe to modern subcultural and ethnic minorities a controversial character. (Ritual, public event, parade, national community)